Biopharmaceutical Services refers to any pharmaceutical drug product manufactured in, extracted from, or semi-synthesised from biological sources. Different from totally synthesised pharmaceuticals, they include vaccines, blood, blood components, allergenic, somatic cells, gene therapies, tissues, recombinant therapeutic protein and living cells used in cell therapy. Biologics can be composed of sugars, proteins or nucleic acids or complex combinations of these substances or may be living cells or tissues. They are isolated from living sources - human, animal, plant or microbial.

Pharmaceutical Contract Services, sometimes known as a contract development and manufacturing organisation, is a company that serves other companies in the pharmaceutical industry on a contract basis to provide comprehensive services from drug development through drug manufacturing. This allows major pharmaceutical companies to outsource those aspects of the business, which can help with scalability or can allow the major company to focus on drug discovery and drug marketing instead. Services offered by these companies include pre-formulation, formulation development, stability studies, method development, pre-clinical and Phase I clinical trial materials.